I watch the way the sunlight and shadows play with his skin as he drives. He catches me staring and reaches out for my hand.
“I should change the air filters,” he says.
“I’ve always wanted to learn how to do that,” I say. A lie. I’ve never given air filters a thought in my life, but now suddenly I need to learn this ordinary thing. Ten years from now, when I’m picking out air filters, I’ll think of him.
“It’s not horribly exciting, but I’ll show you.” A little laugh in his voice. But then his face turns serious and he eases on the gas.
I follow his gaze and see what he does: Sadie pacing across the desert dirt with her fists balled at her sides, her head down. Her light hair gleams like hot chrome in the sun.
Sadie looks up when Edison pulls alongside her, and now that we’re close, I can see the tears streaming down her pink cheeks. “Sades, what is it?” Edison’s voice is the measured calm of a parent treating a swelling bee sting. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” she sobs, and swipes her arm across her nose. It comes away slick with snot and tears.
“Come on, get in,” Edison says.
She shakes her head. “I want to be alone.”
Alone, Edison can’t abide. Not out here, a mile from the nearest building. It would be all too easy for someone to pull over and grab her. Ever since the trucker went missing, the news in this tiny town has been all about the fear factor in their evening ratings. Lock up your children, be wary of hitchhikers, carry pepper spray. All good advice, but it shouldn’t take a missing person’s case to remind us.
Sadie starts walking again, ignoring Edison as he calls after her. He puts the car in reverse to follow her, but I gently take his wrist. I have consoled my sisters enough times to know what a broken heart looks like. “Let me see what I can do,” I tell him. “Wait here.”
“Jade.” He grabs my hand so I won’t get out of the car. “Is this about that boy from her school?”
Even he could see that Sadie’s tears are those of someone whose heart has just been broken. He’s never mentioned the boy who cozies up to Sadie as they emerge from the school, but he’s noticed. In his own quiet, protective way. What else does he notice?
I’ll have to be careful about my response. He restrains himself around Sheila’s killer. Sheila is dead, and he knows that no act ofvengeance would bring her back. But Sadie is alive. He can still protect her, and I know that he would kill someone to do it.
He would come to me in the middle of the night, smeared with desert dirt and blood. I would make sure he got away with it.
“I’m sure it’s nothing serious,” I tell him, watching his response. He glances at Sadie in the mirror, making sure she’s safe as she storms down the dusty road.
“You don’t think—you don’t think he did something to her.”
He can barely get the words out, and it stabs at me to hear the pain in his voice, to see the uncertainty in his eyes. What is wrong with me? Why am I so protective of a man I’ll only have to kill?
“I’m sure it’s nothing like that,” I say, and with those words, I let the image of Edison coming to me smeared with dirt and blood dissolve. We aren’t Bonnie and Clyde. We can’t be. There’s only me, one-third of a murderous trio of sisters, and him, a man who will be buried in the early hours of January first, while New Year’s fireworks light the black desert sky.
Sadie looks over her shoulder when she hears my car door slam shut, and the confusion on her face makes her stand still. I’m part of a package deal to her, something that she’s grudgingly accepted as an extension of Edison. This is the first time I’ve ever sought her out alone.
When I stand before her, she lets out another sniffle and stares at me, that bewilderment turning to curiosity.
She’s walking in the direction opposite her father’s house. There’s nothing ahead of her but the town’s paltry strip mall with the ice-cream truck parked outside the thrift store, both of which are closed on Sunday. She doesn’t have a destination, then. Heartbroken, sweating from the heat, she just wants to disappear in the barrenwilderness. Maybe she’s hoping whoever took the trucker will take her too, I think. Edison and her own father have been warning her for weeks not to go out alone, even in broad daylight.
She’s too young yet to understand how loved she is. Her mother is gone, and the loss magnifies every bitter thing she feels. Grief has a way of shrinking away the good things, putting them in the periphery until they’re just the vague outlines of shadows. Her father may be a miserable stick-in-the-mud, but he cherishes her, the one precious thing in his life. Edison lies awake nights worrying about her.
If Sadie’s corpse were found on the mountainside pecked clean by hawks, it would break those men in a way that cannot ever be repaired. It would tear the fabric of Rainwood itself in two, and all the melted wax from the candlelight vigils couldn’t hope to repair it.
I cannot possibly tell her this. The words would be wasted. She can’t fathom it. So I say, “What’s his name?”
There’s a meanness to her stare, but it isn’t directed at me. It’s because that boy’s name has just been conjured in her mind and she has to hear it again. “Chris,” she mumbles. “He’s on the lacrosse team.”
“Well, then, fuck Chris,” I say. “I never liked him.”
She snorts out a laugh. She turns to Edison, who’s doing a bad job of acting like he isn’t watching us through the rearview mirror. “Will you tell him?” she asks.
“Not if you don’t want me to,” I say.
Her shoulders heave with a sigh. “He’s fourteen,” she says. “He’s going to be a freshman. His parents went to a retreat in Flagstaff, and he wanted me to come over.”
